Editorial Reviews

A stream-of-consciousness dirge depicting one man's wartime experience, Frank D. Gilroy's Private finds a suitably brooding benefactor in the strains of voice actor Jones Allen. Indeed, with his deft role playing and gloomy atmospherics, Allen brings an element of cohesion to a work widely considered one of Gilroy's more inaccessible. The fictional memoir follows Gilroy's 18-year-old protagonist, recently rejected from Yale, through the conscription process to the front lines of World War II. In the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front, Private paints a wartime landscape devoid of heroism or humor, its characters stilted and numbed by the omnipresence of death.

Publisher's Summary

From Frank D. Gilroy - a prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (The Subject Was Roses), screenwriter (Desparate Characters), novelist (From Noon Till Three) and, most recently, author of a best-selling Kindle Single (Lake) - comes this chilling memoir of a young soldier in World War II confronting the nightmare of death. This isn't the battle cry of a war hero; it's the confessions of a young man pressed into service and searching for answers. In Gilroy's spare yet muscular prose, this saga of a young private's journey becomes a universal story of manhood and military life, told from the ground level of combat.